“The incident immediately became an international whodunit: Who would dare to hack the Olympics? The Pyeongchang cyberattack would turn out to be perhaps the most deceptive hacking operation in history, using the most sophisticated means ever seen to confound the forensic analysts searching for its culprit.
“The difficulty of proving the source of an attack—the so-called attribution problem—has plagued cybersecurity since practically the dawn of the internet. Sophisticated hackers can route their connections through circuitous proxies and blind alleys, making it almost impossible to follow their tracks. Forensic analysts have nonetheless learned how to determine hackers’ identities by other means, tying together clues in code, infrastructure connections, and political motivations.
“In the past few years, however, state-sponsored cyberspies and saboteurs have increasingly experimented with another trick: planting false flags. Those evolving acts of deception, designed to throw off both security analysts and the public, have given rise to fraudulent narratives about hackers’ identities that are difficult to dispel, even after governments announce the official findings of their intelligence agencies. It doesn’t help that those official findings often arrive weeks or months later, with the most convincing evidence redacted to preserve secret investigative techniques and sources.”
“At the end of his long chain of internet-address connections, Matonis had found a fingerprint that linked the Olympics attackers back to a hacking operation that directly targeted the 2016 US election. Not only had he solved the whodunit of Olympic Destroyer’s origin, he’d gone further, showing that the culprit had been implicated in the most notorious hacking campaign ever to hit the American political system.”
“Olympic Destroyer was the first time someone used false flags of that kind of sophistication in a significant, national-security-relevant attack,” Healey says. “It’s a harbinger of what the conflicts of the future might look like.”
“As the 2020 election approaches, Olympic Destroyer shows that Russia has only advanced its deception techniques—graduating from flimsy cover stories to the most sophisticated planted digital fingerprints ever seen. And if they can fool even a few researchers or reporters, they can sow even more of the public confusion that misled the American electorate in 2016. “The question is one of audience,” Hultquist says. “The problem is that the US government may never say a thing, and within 24 hours, the damage is done. The public was the audience in the first place.”
(https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-2018-olympics-destroyer-cyberattack/)
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